Media Beat: July 31, 2017

What Was Said

My first job in Private Radio was typing File Cards in The Library of MOR station CJOB AM/FM. I would have preferred to have found a job at either of the Top 40s....CKY or CKRC.

It was April 1963

As it turned out, CJOB was the best station to work for because I got to keep all the Rock & Roll Records. Before too long I was playing records at High School Dances all around Winnipeg. It was how I first met Neil Young.

But that's Another Story.

One of the things I learned was.....there were far more records being released than what I was hearing on The Radio.

Of course, I was expecting that to be the case because each weeknight CKY broadcast 'The Battle of The New Sounds'. As I've told The Story.....probably too many times for some List Members.....it was how “Laugh and The World Laughs With You” by Jack Scott became a hit on CKY.

What other great records being released that were not making it to The Radio.....at least in Winnipeg? Later, as I discovered over my years in Radio....there were quite a lot of them. Many are still among my favourites today.

A few years ago, somewhat to my surprise, a site called The Airheads Radio Survey Archive showed up on the web. What a wonderful Site!! Among many other things, it showed me that “Laugh and The World Laughs With You” was played on radio stations other than CKY.

What other records that I love which were not National Hits.....yet charted elsewhere? And even more fun to know......were there other versions of the song?

All of this came to mind today as I was sorting through the mountain of 45RPMs that I've been moving around with for the past 50 years. I came across 'Nothing Takes the Place of You' by (to me) an obscure singer named Toussaint McCall.

Well....as you can see on the You Tube Page, there are a lot of people who have sung that song and, reading the Comments, Toussaint is not as obscure as I thought he was. I imagine, growing up in Canada, I missed a lot of R&B Hits.

ARSA, too, has a list of people who recorded it, but not nearly as many as You Tube.

Of the other versions of the song I've listened to, I like the Al Green version best. — Warren Cosford, WarrensNetwork

Anticipated CRTC releases for the week of July 31

The regulator plans to issue the following decisions and regulatory policies in the coming week. This list may be incomplete and is subject to change without notice.

Broadcasting Decisions

Applications by various licensees to renew the broadcasting licences for radio stations

Worth Noting

Last week, I enlisted friends’ help for my story about the Classic Hits titles that programmers wished would still perform well enough in music research to play. I was looking for those songs that were true hits at the time, would sound great on the radio now, but did not endure. I wasn’t looking for favorite stiffs or turntable hits—the songs that peaked at No. 14 and were never really hits to begin with—but I got a lot of those, too.

And I also got Facebook comments like this:

“Stop testing and go with your gut.”

“How about we just get rid of these stupid ‘tests?’ They are unscientific and not truly reflective of the public’s tastes” — Sean Ross, Ross on Radio

True diversity will only be achieved when radio represents more than just the media elite, regardless of their gender or race. It’s the people with clear abilities but no background in media — or even knowledge of public radio — that should be sought out by the big networks — Sirena Bergman, Mashable

Radio is where the world first heard Britain declare war on Germany, where Orson Welles accidentally fooled the public into believing a real alien invasion was under way in his "War Of The Worlds" serial and where young people first heard Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock," spreading popular music around the world.

But it is not just an aural medium. Like all important pieces of technology, design has had an essential part to play in its evolution — Clive Martin, CNN

David Farrell

David Farrell has worked at the forefront of Canadian music journalism for over 30 years, founding and editing The Record in the 1980s, before launching FYI Music News...